Case Number 15619

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (BLU-RAY)

The Charge

Play or be played.

Opening Statement

Are you ready for some football...in high definition?

Facts of the Case

Professional football team the Miami Sharks (the NFL declined to participate
in Stone's film) is on the skids. A four-game losing streak is capped off by the
loss of star quarterback Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid, Wyatt Earp) to injury.
Third stringer Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx, Ray) steps in to take the snaps
and proves that he's a rising star. He almost single-handedly lifts the team out
of its funk and puts it on the road to the playoffs. Meanwhile, veteran coach
Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino, Dog Day Afternoon) clashes with team owner
Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz, Being John Malkovich) over the
direction of the team. Tony plays for the love of the game, while Christina
views football as show biz.

The Evidence

There's something about sports that loves a tired cliché. Check out any
postgame press conference in any sport and you'll hear a steady stream of trite
pabulum spewing from the mouths of players and coaches alike, from "we
brought our A-game" to "it was a war out there." So how does one
make a sports movie that avoids boilerplate sports aphorisms and predictable
scenarios both on and off the field? Faced with this question, director Oliver
Stone chose not to avoid such pitfalls at all. Instead, he constructs a tapestry
of cliché so dense and multi-layered that it makes a fair facsimile of
reality (after all, as the late, great David Foster Wallace noted, beneath their
lame and unexciting surfaces, many clichés express great and terrible
truths). Any Given Sunday boldly takes on most of the major tropes that
have defined sports cinema through the decades: the deleterious effect of the
advertising age on the pure joy of playing a game as well as it can be played;
the crass antics of spoiled and ignorant young millionaire players with no
respect for their game's history; the melancholy of older players breaking down
physically and ossified coaches longing for the (probably fictional) days of old
when the sport was pure and uncorrupted; team doctors recklessly administering
painkillers and other drugs to players treated more like business assets than
human beings; the glass ceiling that long kept blacks out of quarterback and
coaching positions; machismo run amuck; ego clashes; sexual peccadilloes; and
divorce and broken families. Rather than being a disorganized mess, Any Given
Sunday is one of the most interesting and compelling sports flicks ever
made, even if it isn't entirely successful.

The movie's biggest problem is that its third act crumbles under the weight
of its own genre demands. The requisite big game set piece is loaded with all
manner of sports movie conventions from questions about whether the wise veteran
or the young upstart will take the starting QB slot, to worries about Coach
D'Amato having the balls to take the sorts of risks necessary to win big games,
to much drama over whether "Shark" Lavay will survive the
career-ending hit that we all know is coming long before the pre-kickoff coin
toss. The big last-second play (all sports movies must have a big last-second
play) is executed with a maximum of slow motion, super-impositions, and
ultra-dramatic synthesizer pedal tones. Stone lays the clichés on so thick,
and resolves them all so conventionally, that the final 30 minutes of the movie
often feel like parody.

Any Given Sunday also suffers from Stone's tendency to reinforce his
themes with condescendingly heavy-handed visuals. As Judge Norman Short noted in
his review of the 2000 DVD release, a scene that crosscuts between Pacino and
Foxx's intense conversation about the philosophy of football and Ben
Hur's famed chariot race playing on a nearby television comes off like a
demonstration of Stone's contempt for an audience he believes too stupid to pick
up on his many comparisons throughout the film of football players to
Roman gladiators. Add to that atrocities like a sequence that punctuates
Pacino's contemplation of the familial cost of his devotion to football with the
superimposition of a close-up of a pigskin right next to the actor's mopey
noggin and Any Given Sunday is rife with moments of unintentional
hilarity. These ponderous excesses are particularly disappointing because when
Stone uses his visual prowess to assist his actors rather than his themes, the
movie works and works incredibly well.

Thankfully, performances are excellent across the board. Pacino nails it as
a gruff, aging coach having difficulty finding his place in the new, media-savvy
era of professional football (though his build and style of dress are more
reminiscent of an NBA coach than NFL). Jamie Foxx is pitch-perfect in his
dramatic debut as a young, black quarterback who goes from struggling with his
confidence to superstardom and a massive chip on his shoulder almost overnight.
Cameron Diaz is surprisingly forceful as an owner/GM struggling to be taken
seriously as she steps into the shoes of her Vince Lombardi-like deceased
father. Though under-utilized, Dennis Quaid expertly walks the fine line between
resolute and downtrodden as a Joe Montana-esque QB on the cusp of retirement.
Smaller roles are capably filled by the likes of James Woods, Matthew Modine,
Aaron Eckhart, Lauren Holly, Ann-Margret, and John C. McGinley. Rapper LL Cool J
is spot-on as a wide receiver with an outsized ego. Even football greats Jim
Brown and Lawrence Taylor acquit themselves well in two small but significant
roles, while Dick Butkus, Johnny Unitas, and Terrell Owens add texture in cameo
appearances. Stone bolsters the fine performances with a visual design that
mixes grit with visual poetry: handheld cameras give the flick an appropriately
rough-around-the-edges feel as we follow coaches and players through locker room
tunnels and find ourselves in the middle of bone-crunching action, while shots
like silhouetted players competing in the rain have a glossy, formal beauty.
Any Given Sunday may a sum lesser its parts, but many of those parts are
visually stunning and thoroughly entertaining.

Warner Bros.' Blu-ray release of Any Given Sunday offers up the
director's cut of the film, which runs six minutes longer than the theatrical
version. The 1080p VC-1 transfer improves upon the already impressive image on
the previously released two-disc DVD. Depth and detail are noticeably superior,
while colors pop more. The transfer is close to pristine. The Dolby TrueHD audio
mix delivers clean dialogue, plenty of crunch during game sequences, and a
realistic ambient space that makes fine use of the rear soundstage even if it
isn't particularly showy.

The disc includes a hefty stable of extras, all of which are ported from the
two-disc special edition DVD, all presented in 480p. There are two audio
commentaries -- one by Stone, the other by Jamie Foxx. Stone is dry but
informative, while Foxx is entertaining but plagued by long gaps of silence.

Full Contact: The Making of Any Given Sunday (27:07) is an
electronic press kit-style making-of documentary produced by HBO. After Stone's
informative commentary, the featurette doesn't offer any insights you won't have
already heard.

Jamie Foxx Audition Tape and Screen Tests provides raw video of Foxx
showing off his football skills, as well as two screen tests that prove he can
pull off dramatic acting (at this point in his career, Foxx was known primarily
for his antics on the sketch comedy show, In Living Color). The three
reels (which can be strung together with a Play All feature) run about six
minutes.

There are also 14 deleted scenes (most of them brief), a gag reel, and
montages of football outtakes and establishing shots of football stadiums filled
with fans. A music-only audio option allows you to watch the movie alongside
tunes by Smoky Robinson, Moby, Jamie Foxx, Robbie Robertson, and others. An
"Instant Replay" option provides you with direct action to the movie's
gameplay sequences. Two stills galleries house poster art and production
photographs. There are music videos for "Shut 'Em Down" by LL Cool J,
and "My Name Is Willie" and "Any Given Sunday" by Jamie
Foxx. Finally, the film's theatrical trailer is archived on the disc.

Closing Statement

Any Given Sunday entertains even if it doesn't transcend the trappings
of its genre and the excesses of its director.